Massive lawsuits as Google actually sells services that would stop working, or that other vendors depend on.
Retaliation from the EU on alledged past violations.
Loss of revenue around 30-40% (just a guess) from losing EU customers (500M people market of first world countries) == lawsuits from its own US shareholders.
A wave of investments into EU newly found search market from all over the world.
Unsustainable political pressure from the US establishment to go back to EU ("we need that data and you're handing it to China or even worst, national states of Europe)
Tremendous loss of soft power and influence of the US on the old continent.
Financial default of tens of thousands of EU businesses, subsequent EU bailout, subsequent new protectionist measures over Internet businesses-
No more stupid comments on Youtube.
Who's that guy with a beard asking for money? It's Larry Page.
Websites all over EU begin to have a links section again.
Android gets banned, Nokia resurrects, with a big advertising campaign praising the long battery life and low radiation.
People cannot reach facebook anymore. They cannot look it up on Google and don't know what a domain name is. So they get on the road to ask other people how to reach facebook again. Then they become friend with them. And mate. Twenty years later Europe has now 10 competing search engines, the population had tripled as the result of mating and the average age has halved. They have far more less money than before, and they blame the greeks for that.
One of the best things to happen to the European tech scene since the beginning of the Internet.
You can see this happening in Russia, China and India although for different reasons.
Even if this case doesn't change anything I think we will see Google's involvement be reduces drastically in the next 5 years due to European Union laws and restrictions.
I think you massively underestimate how much investment is required to produce even a basic search engine, let alone one that eventually catches up to what Google has produced. And that's just search. Now throw in Gmail, Maps, Android, Chrome, etc ... these are international collaborations for a reason.
There's also Bing, and the various ancient abandoned former greats of search: Altavista (now Yahoo), Lycos.
Even people on HN who mention trying to use other search engines talk about having to frequently come back to google to find the result that they need. Whether that's us 'learning to Google' or Google being a superior product is up for debate.
search: bing, yandex, baidu, naver
email: fastmail, hotmail, yandex email
maps: bing maps, nokia maps, open street maps (or whatever the collaboration is called)
browser: firefox, etc
Also, most likely, you would see bing+other local search engines gain traction, same for mail, maps, etc. Lets not forget, that a lot (majority?) of google search users use whatever the search engine is by default on their browsers and aren't really concerned about using google per se. Except search, a lot of folks where I live don't use google products (and if I switched their search engine they probably wouldn't notice that much except for saying it looks different)
In my city in northern Germany (300k population), Google hasn’t updated anything since 2004. Refuses to integrate transit, although transit data is available in the requested format.
While Bing and Here maps both have data from last month, with 3D imagery, and realtime transit data. Of course it’s easy to choose which maps app one will use.
And all the nice AI features Google has over Bing & Co – like Google Now’s "you have to go 5min earlier to work because of a traffic jam" obviously don’t work without realtime transit and up-to-date maps data.
In the medium term? Having a social network with no Europeans on it kills G+ fairly rapidly, or it becomes a minority thing like Orkut. Likewise AppEngine is hobbled if it won't talk to Europe. People will undoubtedly continue to use and buy their Android phones (many of which are not bought from google but third parties) unless Google actively bricks them.
Remote-bricking all European Android devices is the nuclear option. Google is sued for billions. Google executives can no longer set foot in the EU without being arrested. International trade war starts. Google is declared an "unlawful combatant" and their HQ is bombed by DGSE.
That's not what the EC is saying. They're saying "hey guys, you're welcome to dominate over here, but as that dominant player you cannot use such and such licensing practices that we consider anti-competitive"
Antitrust concerns commonly get enforced against companies within the country raising those concerns, but I don't know of any example of antitrust concerns raised by a country against an entirely foreign company and used to block imports of the company's products.
Like them, Google has lots of staff and offices throughout the EU.... although (not uniquely) it uses various methods to avoid paying taxes ;-)
I mean Google is the #1 search engine basically in the world (excluding some Asian countries who have their own search engines) so if Google was to theoretically block all of Europe, it would be really hard to tell what would happen...
Would there be riots? Would governments try to force Google back? Like, are they so essential to digital life that a complete withdrawal would cause some amount of chaos?
And if that's the case, isn't an antitrust suit a bit disingenuous? Isn't that like saying "hey, you guys are dominating over here, we want you to stop, but we also are going to continue to reinforce your dominance by continuing to use all of your services"?